WTOP reports that there are between 20–25 vehicles that left Scranton, Pa. on Tuesday and are currently in bumper-to-bumper traffic outside of Washington. But the threat of arrest has caused some truckers to back away, and it’s unknown how many trucks will actually make it into the city.
In 1946, Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, who was the new ambassador to the Soviet Union, left Spaso House late at night to meet with Generalissimo Josef Stalin in the Kremlin. Winston Churchill had recently delivered his Iron Curtain speech and relations between West and East could hardly have been frostier. The Cold War had begun. The first question Smith asked the Soviet leader was “What does the Soviet Union want, and how far is Russia going to go?” Stalin was impassive. “He did not look at me directly,” Smith wrote in his memoirs, “but kept his head turned to one side, taking an occasional puff from a long Russian cigarette.” After Smith reiterated the question, Stalin looked directly at him and said, “We’re not going much further.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ontario Premier Doug Ford publicly supported each other last week when they invoked their respective federal and provincial emergency laws to end the vaccine mandate protest in Ottawa.
It was another example of the dramatic transformation of Ford from billing himself as Trudeau’s worst nightmare — which is how he campaigned in the 2018 Ontario election that brought him to power — to being one of Trudeau’s closest allies among the premiers.
Vladimir Putin has said there is broad public support for the invasion of Ukraine that he announced just before dawn on Thursday morning. But by evening, thousands of people in cities across Russia had defied police threats to take to central squares and protest against the military campaign.
Police had made at least 1,702 arrest in 53 Russian cities as of Thursday evening, according to the OVD-Info monitor, as they cracked down on the unsanctioned protests. Most of the arrests were made in Moscow and St Petersburg, where the crowds were largest.
The protesters chanted: “No to war!” as they exchanged shocked reactions to the attack on Ukraine.
In yet another… uneven press conference appearance, President Biden’s worst line was, “they are profound sanctions. Let’s have a conversation in another month or so to see if they’re working.”
It’s not clear that President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian government, and the Ukrainian armed forces have another month. Russian and Ukrainian forces are fighting over control of Antonov Airfield, just 15 minutes from Kyiv.
Canada is hurting. The pandemic was bad enough, but Canada’s exit from the crisis is looking just as disappointing. The government has run up several decades’ worth of debt. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s support appears to be collapsing. The official Opposition and the other national parties are lost in the political weeds. The Freedom Convoy exposed huge fault lines in the country and demonstrated the unwillingness of the provinces and the federal government to enforce the rule of law.
Well I personally am shocked that this wasn’t a deterrent! pic.twitter.com/urFMx0lNHD
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 24, 2022
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. A promotional video from the Canadian Bankers Association (CBA) helps to neatly connect all the dots about why the Canadian government made such a quick reversal in their bank asset seizures in the last 24 hours. And yes, as we suspected, it was almost certainly contact from the World Economic Forum to Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland that triggered the change in position.
h/t Mauser 98
This feels like the flip side of the White House’s rhetorical game-playing about “invasions” versus “minor incursions.” How “minor” does an incursion need to be to avoid qualifying as an “invasion”?
Similarly, how restrained does the U.S. response to Russian aggression need to be to avoid qualifying as “major? The term is sufficiently vague that it can mean anything.
I hope Trudeauscu commits to 40,000 Ukraine refugees as he did for his Afghan Mohammedans.
Studying the “most dangerous viruses in the world” at Russia’s border.
Putin didn’t destroy those labs – he wants to seize them intact. What a PR coup against the USA!
The Canadian trucker convoy suggests a new class divide originating in our experience of reality itself.
The world is watching what’s happening in Canada with a mixture of fascination and horror. The weeks-long saga of the “Freedom Convoy” protest against pandemic restrictions, spearheaded by Canadian truckers, has taken an authoritarian turn. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers to crush the peaceful protest, suspending civil liberties protections, arresting hundreds, and taking the unprecedented step of ordering dissident citizens entirely frozen out of the financial system. What brought Canada’s normally placid politics to this point?
The bitter and unbalanced assaults on the truckers by the Canadian government and its “intelligentsia” are slammed by writer Elizabeth Nickson in her Substack article, “The Reason for the Police Violence is not What You Think.” She describes the contempt these elites have toward those they regard as their underlings. She looks at the self-serving machinations of the ruling class and to what ends they will go in order to protect their gravy train: “The brutality in Ottawa is not a warning. It is a promise, a statement of the future. The working class will end their lives in moldering houses they can’t afford to fix, with minimal health care.”
In just over one year in office, U.S. President Joe Biden has swung from a pledge to oust Turkey’s Islamist autocrat, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to occasionally appease him, first behind doors, and now publicly.
Appearing to detest Erdoğan’s suffocating regime, increasingly Islamist governance and pro-Russian aspirations, Biden, a year before he became president, had described Erdoğan as an autocrat and promised to empower Turkey’s opposition parties through democratic processes.
